Ceding Any Turf to a Gang Can Haunt a City for Years

Los Angeles wants to expand its war against the notorious 18th Street gang, but it’s confronting a problem that has occurred in many cities around the nation: what to do after municipal officials unwittingly or knowingly cede communities to criminals.

Here, for example, successive administrations ignored this gang for 30 years or more. In those 30 years, 18th Street grew to as many as 20,000 members, now ranging from Orange County to Oregon and into other regions. According to congressional testimony and the Times series that brought these pervasive thugs to wide public notice, the gang now has elements on the East Coast and deals directly with international drug trafficking cartels.

Current Los Angeles officials turn to the court-tested use of injunctions, targeting particular gang members in strictly defined areas. Named gang members are not allowed to meet in public in those areas and are barred from otherwise legal activities. As a weapon, however, injunctions leave much to be desired; gang members can always coordinate their crimes in a home or apartment. In addition, it might seem insignificant, to the gang and to residents, when Los Angeles police get the green light to take back the moral equivalent of a small border village in a vast gangland. Los Angeles is trying to avoid that impression by having a highly symbolic target: the whole Pico-Union area, 18th Street’s birthplace.

In many cities, the gangs fed off the inaction of local governments. Police entered many crime-ridden neighborhoods rarely and only in force, viewing residents as potential enemies. Call it windows-up, locked-door, drive-thru policing; it is the antithesis of the now favored community-based patrol. The fleeting and impersonal police presence told residents that their plight did not matter and that the criminals had the staying power. Small wonder that these residents became less and less interested in reporting crime.

In the late 1970s and ‘80s, crime soared and the initial and wrongheaded solutions were far more dismissive of civil liberties than today’s injunctions. Some cities briefly tried to reinvigorate old loitering laws, but they had the effect of declaring crime-ridden neighborhoods off-limits for everyone. One city, seeking to curb drug sales, outlawed the passing of small objects to another person. That law was struck down because Mom’s peach cobbler recipe could have been the object exchanged. Street barricades gained favor until the gangs began to use them to escape patrol car pursuits.

Today’s injunctions, enforced only against certain gang leaders, represent the best and most refined approach to date, and they are the most respectful of civil liberties. But problems may yet result. It’s one thing to target 10 or 20 gang members, or even three dozen, the number in a case recently affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. A few dozen faces can be memorized or that many photographs can be taped to the sun visors of patrol cars. But try 300 gang members, as Los Angeles now wants to do, and it gets a little dicey. It’s also more labor-intensive for the police officers, who might be inclined to spend more time scouting for gang members and less time on regular patrol. Another problem in such a situation is that officers are more likely to pick up the wrong people.

There is no tidy little course to take when the real blunder occurred years before. When cities abandon neighborhoods and their residents, they cause as much lasting damage as the criminals who eventually take control. That’s why cities can’t afford to write off any neighborhoods. Los Angeles seems to have finally learned that, as it attempts to reclaim 18th Street turf, block by block, for the law-abiding residents who live there.